Critics Picks
Edited by Armond White
New York’s Review of Culture • CityArtsNYC.com
CLASSICAL Reading Music: The Music Manuscripts Online project began in 2007, providing more than 900 manuscripts (almost 42,000 pages) of classic compositions now digitized and described for posterity. View works by J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert and Schumann, among many others, all in their own hand. themorgan.org/ music. [Phyllis Workman] DANCE Bausch Bequest: By way of India and Paris, Shantala Shivalingappa brings Asian and European influences together to creates sinuous and flowing physical lines and kinetic beauty. She debuts a performance titled “Namasya,” presenting all her inspirations and innovations, at The Joyce. This former member of the Pina Bausch troupe now steps out on her own and steps forward gracefully. June 27-July 1; $10+. The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-242-0800, joyce. org. [PW] GALLERIES Storybook Structures: Four New Yorkbased artists—Amy Kao, Colin O’Con, Butcher Walsh and Charmaine Wheatley— transform the windows of the ONYP Art Space for the River to River Festival. Their large-scale architectural storybooks lets viewers use their imagination to create and experience storytelling. June 21-Aug. 24. One New York Plaza at Whitehall & Water Sts., rivertorivernyc.com. [PW]
Salma Hayek and Mathieu Demy in Americano.
The Son Also Rises For Mathieu Demy, art is a family saga By Armond White
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n tabloid parlance, Mathieu Demy is cinema royalty. Son of the late, great French new wave director Jacques Demy (Lola, Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), he is also the son of Agnès Varda, the pioneering female director of the Left Bank who excels in fiction and nonfiction films (Vagabond, The Gleaners and I). Both parental legacies are honored by Mathieu Demy’s directorial debut, Americano, a young man’s exploration of his family heritage that has obvious autobiographical parallels but is also an extraordinary personal investigation. Demy himself plays Martin, a Frenchman who travels from Paris to Los Angeles, where his artist mother had relocated, to bury her and claim her estate. Pursuing more than his mother’s paintings, Martin’s fascination with his psychic heritage includes the cross-cultural fascination that American culture—the American ideal—has on European consciousness. This personalized story of political and sexual colonization is localized in the mys-
tery of his mother’s best friend, a woman named Lola (Salma Hayek). Martin traces her to Mexico, where he discovers a Latin American version of nouvelle vague cultural magnetism; Lola strips in a bar named Café Americano, feeling exiled from the opportunities and livelihood just beyond the border. For film students, Americano’s odyssey parallels the journey that both Jacques Demy and Varda made when the cinèphile couple trekked to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. There, Varda directed the documentary Lions Love and Demy directed The Model Shop—the former examining a countercultural demimonde, the latter an extension of the cinematic mythology that began with the film Lola, Demy’s own debut about the quest for love. For Lola’s characters, Desire epitomized Faith. It is one of cinema’s great humanist testaments, a farcical drama with a perfectly balanced narrative that plays as buoyantly as a musical. In Lola, a romantic young man (Marc Michel) courts a small-town taxi dancer played by Anouk Aimée who is also romanced by an American sailor. She awaits her first love’s return from a mysterious U.S. sojourn driving a long white Cadillac. Americano feels more noir-like than Lola; its plot is less naïve but shows the difficulty of Euro-American rela-
tions many decades, artistic styles and social movements later. Mathieu Demy repurposes the figure of Lola as a figment of imagination, the key to understanding his parents’ desires as well as his own—particularly his personal connection to human heritage. Hayek’s Lola is a more powerfully erotic figure than that flighty Madonna the great Aimée embodied as an émigré who wound up posing for bawdy photos in The Model Shop. Americano’s noir complexities are shadowed by the puzzle of parental sexuality. This has been a subtext in some of the docs Varda has made commemorating Jacques Demy’s 1990 death from AIDS, and it is also interesting subtext in Americano. This film’s cast includes a parade of secondgeneration cinema royalty: Geraldine Chaplin, Chiara Mastroianni and Carlos Bardem. Exploring love and desire as a family saga takes work of staggering sophistication and bravery, which Mathieu Demy accomplishes with honesty, imagination and redemptive brilliance. The troubled and perplexed Martin realizes a more complicated innocence—not naïveté—than a mere fanboy movie tribute. “I’ll walk you home,” he tells a Mexican urchin. Americano is, at last, a cinematic version of the famous Delmore Schwartz parentcinema-child short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” It is Demy’s dedication to family heritage that turns his connection to a series of inherited clues and obligations into a film of genuine originality.
Jazz “Africa/Brass” Redux: Pianist McCoy Tyner, surviving member of John Coltrane’s immortal 1960s quartet, revisits “Africa/Brass,” a noble, sweeping suite for jazz orchestra, with the Charles Tolliver Big Band performing the original charts. Coltrane’s tenor sax solos will be emulated, not imitated, by Billy Harper and Bill Saxton, among others. June 21-24, 8 & 10:30 p.m.; $30 at the bar, $45 for a table. Blue Note Jazz Club, 131 3rd St., 212-475-8592, bluenotejazzfestival.org. [Howard Mandel] The Longest Miles: Horn play in the long shadow of Miles Davis, by trumpeter Wallace Roney in the quartet of Davis’ favorite drummer, Al Foster, Jun 22-23; trumpeter Philip Harper, with his own quintet, June 27-28; and trumpeter Tom Harrell’s quintet with tenor sax powerhouse Wayne Escoffrey, June 29-30. All shows 8, 10 and 11:30 p.m. Smoke Jazz and Supper Club-Lounge, 2751 Broadway, betw. 105th & 106th Sts., 212-864-6662, smokejazz.com. [HM] Next-Gen Django: Hot Club of France guitarist Django Reinhardt would have great-grandchildren by now, and Air France presents a pride of them, called “The Young Lions of Gypsy Jazz,” to carry forth in the European light-as-a-feather/quick-as-a-wink melodic style. Local ringers Anat Cohen (clarinet), Grace Kelly (alto sax) and FrenchDominican singer Cyrille Amée are guest stars. June 20-24, 8:30 & 11 p.m.; $40, $10 food & drink minimum. Birdland, 315 W. 44th St., 212-581-3080, birdlandjazz.com. [HM]
CITYARTS museums
Ellsworth Kelly’s plane beauty By Jim Long
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t the Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street subway station, I was recently reminded of Ellsworth Kelly’s excellence in the realm of public art. Even with stacks of newspapers piled against the left panel of a green/blue arc and Service Changes taped to companion panels, his work seemed oblivious to the intrusion and, like a Cage composition accepting chance, it soldiered cheerfully on. Like Cage, it is Kelly’s acutely reductive sensibility at the intersection of abstraction and representation that makes his once uncomfortably “cool” classical simplicity now so accessible to the general public. The artist has long been able to nourish an aesthetic usually associated with European art of the ’20s and ’30s and in New York with the Steiglitz group. Applying objective observation to chance subject matter, he met both originators of the genre, Arp and Cage, during his Paris years, and through conversations with each, Kelly
found “found.” Closed contour drawing has been with us since the cave artists and continues as a tradition, but until medieval times, it depicted mainly humans and animals. Artists ignored the botanical world until plants acquired symbolic significance and the Renaissance brought forth studies of fruit and flowers as careful as those of anatomy. Excepting his early years, Arp’s later work suffered from a surfeit of “art,” and something similar applies to the current survey of Kelly’s plant drawings. Encircling negative space with a deft contour line, the artist draws a blank so well that it feels more like a well-rehearsed performance than an attempt to describe what his eye sees. He does, however, acquaint us with another aspect of his ongoing concern: the plane in space and the planar aspect of a plant’s structural response to light and gravity. In addition, Kelly refers to these drawings as portraits, and this writer feels that the portrait aspect applies as much to each individual specimen as it does to the many artists through whose eyes Kelly learned to resolve the tension between plane abstraction and the planar nature: Gauguin, Calder, O’Keeffe, Callahan, Léger, Matisse, Demuth,
Photograph courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Plant Life
Ellsworth Kelly, “Wild Grape,” 1961, Watercolor on paper, 22 1/8 x 28 1/2 in.
Mondrian and Hokusai, in addition to Arp and Cage. Seeing, and the representation of what is seen, are both learned and developed experiences. The charming page of apples that opens the exhibition is distinctly Gauguin, and the intricate vertical “Seaweed” (1949) is closely informed by Léger’s holly leaves of 1928-30. “Sweetpea” (1960) and “Coral Leaf” (1987) float with the grace of Calder’s constructions, and the wonderful back-side view of “Sunflower” (1983) is filled with da Vinci’s hours in the Vatican garden. The calla lily is a signature motif in
O’Keeffe’s work, and Demuth’s watercolors have echoes here as well. A complex meandering outline identifies a chrysanthemum with a nod to Mondrian and is emblematic of Kelly’s method: to reduce and refine until only an essential image remains. As a whole, the works, curated by The Met’s Marla Prather, bring us some memories of drawings from an era when art was modern. Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings Through Sept. 3, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.
Jazz CITYARTS
Honor Thy Jazz Player Bestowing awards on what matters By Howard Mandel
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f you were to have walked into the Blue Note at 4 p.m. on June 20, you’d have heard guitar wiz Gabriel Marin improvising microtonal figures with a Middle Eastern tinge on double-necked guitar, electric bassist John Ferrara by his side. You could have grabbed a bottle of Brother Thelonious ale and plate of appetizers and, spying a friend across the room, navigated a mass of famous musicians, music journalists and significant others from the inner circles of the jazz industry/community, then schmoozed until MC Josh Jackson from WBGO introduced local “jazz heroes” Robin Bell-Stevens, executive director of JazzMobile, and Adrian Ellis, late of Jazz at Lincoln Center. You’d have been at the 2012 Jazz Awards. Jazz honors are bestowed publicly in New York City twice a year: in January, when the National Endowment of the Arts celebrates Jazz Masters, and in June, when the Jazz Journalists Association hails excellence in music and media.
The JJA gala cocktail party, open to the public—with 13 related parties from Auckland, New Zealand, to Tucson, Ariz.— is a grassroots initiative produced by the music’s professional observers and biggest fans. Awards include Lifetime Achievement, Up and Coming Musician of the Year, Players of the Year for all instruments and Best Record, Book, Blog, Periodical and Website. Winners are selected through two stages of voting by the organization’s journalist members. We (I’m president of the JJA) provide food, wine, beer and entertainment—this year, alongside Marin and Ferrara, were the Organ Monk Quartet and singer Paulette McWilliams with pianist Nat Adderley Jr. The awards are announced and presented from the stage. Party favors include new CDs. A good time is had by all. But why? Isn’t media attention, paying gigs and applause enough to thank jazz people for what they do? Well, no. Most artists crave attention, and maybe especially jazz musicians, for whom the main rewards of the American entertainment industry—money and fame—are remote, but who strive to be productive, creative and expressive anyway. Then there’s the fact that almost everybody loves a party,
Paulette McWilliams.
and the JJA’s New York City Jazz Awards party is one of the few opportunities for players, pundits, producers, presenters and devotees to share face time without being shushed ’cause there’s a gig going on. But the real reason we hold the Jazz Awards is to make some noise about jazz itself. This great American art form underlies nearly all American music made today, a point seldom articulated by the NEA, the Grammies or other entities promoting culture here and now, but demonstrably true. Why jazz is overlooked and underap-
preciated is a topic worthy of discussion; I think it’s taken for granted. Americans are improvisers by nature. We dig elegant and hard-driving rhythms. Given a basic melody line, we belt it out our way. That’s jazz, folks, as vital a base of our social interactions as democracy and freedom of speech or action. Of course we should applaud those who do jazz best, and those who let us know about them. Praise jazz! Contact Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@ gmail.com
interview CITYARTS
The CityArts Interview
Mathieu Demy.
Mathieu Demy
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he son of the late French filmmaker Jacques Demy (Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and his formerly estranged wife, Agnès Varda (Far from Vietnam, The Gleaners and I), Mathieu Demy sees his first directorial feature, Americano, as a riposte to his mother’s 1981 film Documenteur: An Emotion Picture. One of Varda’s many semiautobiographical/fictional conceits—the title translates to “Docu-liar”—that film enlisted Demy as a 9-year-old actor playing the son of a woman trying to start her life over in Los Angeles after a tumultuous breakup. Demy, who was in a sense that boy in reality, mixes the movie mythology of his father’s romantic nouvelle vague masterpieces with his own turbulent relationship with his vagabond mother and enigmatic father. It’s a journey worth following. [Gregory Solman]
I expected to see the influence of your parents in Americano, but I saw Wim Wenders. Paris, Texas, was definitely an influence. It’s one of my favorite films ever and an inspiration for Americano, definitely. Obviously, I try to put in references, winks, inside jokes, and in that state of mind as an audience, you get caught up in that game and find stuff not intended by the director. I just wanted to put in iconic imagery, connections to films that I loved as a child. They are not necessarily understandable to get the story, but it’s something else on top of the story you can have fun finding. Walter Hill, who was a friend of your father, told me that Jacques Demy believed American directors had discovered a secret—that the ideal length of a feature is 85 minutes—then lost it. I’ve never heard that. At 105 minutes, I missed the point—I’m fucked! In a way, I agree and don’t really agree. When it comes
to perception, what’s so fascinating about time and so fascinating about memory is that it’s not equal. I didn’t get bored for a second watching Titanic at three hours and 20 minutes, and I recently watched a onehour film that seemed to be a year. When it comes to traditional storytelling, I think this is pretty smart; it’s true. But then again, the perception of time is so different from one person to another. But as a filmmaker, it seems you applied a certain discipline to the construction of scenes. When I was editing, my perspective was that I had to make it as short as possible without hurting the feel of the film. If I could have made it 85 minutes, I would have loved to, but it would have damaged, a little bit, that sort of mellow feel I wanted. I wanted people to dream about other films to get into those references, escape a little bit, because that’s the sort of film it is. Were you influenced by the nouvelle vague or the Rive Gauche group or did you feel unconstrained about adopting American influence? Unconstrained. I knew I wanted to make a film that fit my influences, which are not only French or new wave, because of my parents. You mentioned Wenders—Jacques would show me westerns—Rio Bravo, Shane, Johnny Guitar—and American musicals and his musicals… Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Gene Kelly? Yes. And Disney cartoons—lots of Disney cartoons. I wanted to put all those influences of the films I love, have them there, because Americano is really a film about my childhood and related to Documenteur— being an actor in my mom’s film—and also related to the films that Jacques would show me as a kid. A Belgian journalist said I was
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CITYARTS dance
Youth and Life Force Bolshoi and Kirov vitality preserved By Joel Lobenthal
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egendary Russian dancers show why they are legends in the new DVD Treasures of the Russian Ballet (ICA Classics/Naxos). It contains performances by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and (then) Leningrad’s Kirov filmed by the BBC in London from 1956 to 1963, some on stage, some in the television studio. The longest excerpt in the anthology is Act 1 of Yuri Grigorovich’s The Stone Flower, recorded during the Kirov’s debut London season in the summer of 1961. Yuri Soloviev was 20 and Alla Sizova 21 at the time they were filmed here. But for once we’re privy to young dancers not trying to merchandize their youth, but instead experiencing it. They create a portrait of young love that is irrefutable not only visually but artistically. Alla Osipenko dances the role of a mythical mountain dweller who bewitches Soloviev’s character. Her role is filled with jumps to suggest ferality and brittle full stops enabling her unsurpassed arabesque to imprint itself. The preserved performance is a fitting birthday tribute to Osipenko, who turned 80 last week. The Bolshoi’s Raissa Struchkova and Maya Plisetskaya: call them the Life Force ballerinas. Filmed here in excerpts from Cinderella, Struchkova is a quintessential embodiment of the vitality for which the Bolshoi was celebrated. Dancing Kitri in Don Quixote, Plisetskaya transcends soubrette clichés—or is what she’s really doing instead a revelatory distillation of the charm and power of the archetype? Her partner, Vladimir Vasiliev, like Soloviev, and the Bolshoi’s Maris Liepa and Mikhail Lavrovsky, show in this DVD the way they revealed to the world new possibilities for male ballet expression.
Continued from previous page “avant premier film,” before your first film. That was pretty smart. Because if I hadn’t the ambition to talk about where I’m coming from, the style would probably have been different. I’d like to hear more about the cinemathèque run by your parents. They felt that as parents, the best thing to do was to show what they like and afterward let me see whatever I want. Those 16mm films they would show me at the family house on the west coast of France in the summer when I had a school vacation would include mostly Jacques’ films, but also Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Pickpocket, Singing in the
Galina Ulanova was a product of the Kirov but was transferred to the Bolshoi at the end of World War II. At 46, Ulanova is quite astonishing in the White Swan adagio from Swan Lake, captured during the company’s debut season in London in 1956. Her performance is technically imperfect by the standards of her day or ours, and yet at any calendar age or historical epoch Ulanova would be the kind of artist about whom quibbles are irrelevant. Every step she takes demonstrates a personal and masterly way of shaping a step, a phrase, a role, a larger metaphor.
Indeed, it’s not possible here to mention, let alone do justice to all the great performances in this collection—let me just say that everything on it is crucial viewing! Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal. com
Rain, the westerns I mentioned, Max Ophuls and Hitchcock, The Birds and Psycho. I’m intrigued by your decision to shoot on film. Why was that important to you? It’s still possible. Soon enough it won’t be possible at all, so it was interesting for that. And I wanted to find a form that that could dialog with Documenteur—and be distinct from Documenteur but also be the same organic thing. We match modern Super 16mm with 35mm in 1981. It’s the same thing but very different. The stock is much better now and much different. We wanted to shoot in CinemaScope for this change in format, we tried 35mm, but it was too clean. It didn’t match Documenteur, and I wanted a dialog.